Born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells became the most important investigative journalist of the campaign against lynching. After a white mob murdered three of her friends in Memphis in 1892, she gathered the evidence behind the killings and showed that lynching was a tool of economic and political terror rather than a response to crime — work for which the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded her a posthumous special citation in 2020.
At a Glance
- Born
- 16 July 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi
- Died
- 25 March 1931, Chicago, Illinois
- Birth name
- Ida Bell Wells
- Known for
- Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892); A Red Record (1895); Alpha Suffrage Club (1913); Pulitzer Prize special citation (2020)
- HBCU ties
- Rust College (Attended Shaw University (now Rust College), Holly Springs, as a girl)
- Fields
- Journalism · Civil Rights · Organizing
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Ida Bell Wells was born on 16 July 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the eldest child of James Wells, a carpenter, and Elizabeth Warrenton Wells, a cook, both enslaved. Freed at the end of the Civil War, her parents were active in Reconstruction politics and education, and she attended Shaw University, a freedmen’s school in Holly Springs later renamed Rust College.
In 1878, when she was sixteen, a yellow fever epidemic killed both of her parents and an infant brother. Determined to keep her surviving siblings together, she passed a teacher’s examination and taught in a rural school. Around 1882 she moved with two of her sisters to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with an aunt, and she taught in the Shelby County and then the Memphis city schools.
Life and Work
Wells’s public career began with a confrontation on a train. In May 1884, holding a first-class ticket, she refused a conductor’s order to leave the ladies’ car for the smoking car and was forcibly removed. She sued the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad and won damages in a local circuit court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the judgment in 1887. The ruling left her, in her own later account, bitterly disappointed, but her newspaper writing about the case launched her as a journalist. Under the pen name “Iola” she wrote for the Black religious weekly The Living Way and other papers, and in 1889 she became part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In 1891 the Memphis school board dismissed her after she criticized conditions in the city’s segregated Black schools.
On 9 March 1892 a white mob took Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, who ran the People’s Grocery, a Black-owned store competing with a white grocer, from the Memphis jail and shot them to death. Moss was a close friend. Wells urged Black Memphians to leave the city, and thousands did. She then began investigating lynchings across the South and concluded that the standard justification — the rape of white women — was absent in most cases and often a pretext. In May 1892, after she published an editorial saying so, a mob destroyed the Free Speech office while she was away in the North, and she was warned that she would be killed if she returned.
From New York she continued the investigation in T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age and in the pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). In 1893 she joined Frederick Douglass and others in producing The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, distributed at the Chicago world’s fair. Lecture tours of Britain in 1893 and 1894 carried the campaign abroad and led to the formation of the London Anti-Lynching Committee. In 1895 she published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894, whose title announced its method. It tabulated lynchings for 1892, 1893, and 1894 largely from reports in white newspapers, so that the record could not be dismissed as partisan.
On 27 June 1895 she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and editor of the Conservator, and made Chicago her base; she took the name Wells-Barnett and raised four children while continuing her work. She helped organize Black women’s clubs, including the National Association of Colored Women, and in 1898 carried the anti-lynching campaign to President William McKinley. In 1909 she spoke at the National Negro Conference in New York that led to the NAACP; initially left off its Committee of Forty, she was added after protests, though she soon distanced herself from the organization’s leadership. She founded the Negro Fellowship League to aid Black migrants in Chicago, and on 30 January 1913 organized the Alpha Suffrage Club, the city’s first Black women’s suffrage organization. In March 1913, at the national suffrage parade in Washington, she refused to march in a segregated section and joined the Illinois delegation. In 1930 she ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois State Senate as an independent.
Legacy
Wells-Barnett died of kidney disease in Chicago on 25 March 1931. Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, which she had left unfinished, was edited by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1970. Her Chicago home, the Ida B. Wells-Barnett House, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974.
On 4 May 2020 the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded her a special citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching,” with a bequest in support of her mission. Her method — documenting each case, naming names, and turning the white press’s own reports into evidence — anticipated modern data journalism, and her insistence that lynching was organized violence protecting white economic and political power remains the starting point for its historical study.
Ida B. Wells used evidence, much of it drawn from white newspapers, to prove that lynching was organized terror rather than punishment for crime. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 16 July 1862 Born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
- 1878 Loses both parents to yellow fever; begins teaching to support her siblings.
- May 1884 Forcibly removed from a first-class railroad car; sues the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad.
- 1889 Becomes part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight.
- 9 March 1892 Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart lynched in Memphis.
- May 1892 Mob destroys the Free Speech office; Wells is exiled from Memphis.
- 1892 Publishes Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.
- 1895 Publishes A Red Record; marries Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago.
- 30 January 1913 Founds the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago.
- 25 March 1931 Dies in Chicago.
Sources and Further Reading
- Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
- Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892).
- Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad, 2008).
- Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).
- National Park Service, “Ida B. Wells.” Link
- National Women’s History Museum, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” Link
- The Pulitzer Prizes, “Ida B. Wells: 2020 Special Citation.” Link
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